cgraves67:Clock Spider Jerusalem: brigid_fitch: No, Russian sounds like a normal, Eastern European language. Hungarian, on the other hand, sounds utterly alien. My paternal grandmother and her 5 sisters were all from Hungary. When they'd get together, it sounded like Klingons discussing battle strategy.

That language is supposed to be related to Basque, Finnish, and Estonian. Those three are nice sounding. Hungarin is weird. Blame paprika.

Russian is a Slavic language. It's not related to Finnish, Estonian, or Basque. Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are related to each other. They are in the Finno-Urgric language family. Basque is a language isolate. It is related to no other living language or known dead language.

Not to be pedantic, but the language family for Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian is technically Uralic; Finno-Ugric is one branch of it, with the Samoyedic languages on the other branch (according to some theories, the Samoyedic languages were the first to split away from the Uralic root stock). It's pretty common to call the whole thing Finno-Ugric, although slightly inaccurate. Internal classifications, especially in the Finno-Ugric branch, are a source of great conjecture and a ton of argument; there's a whole (non-mainstream) school of thought that Hungarian is actually a Turkic language with Uralic influences, rather than a Uralic language with a lot of Turkic influences, and that Uralic isn't a legitimate language family. That's a pretty fringey theory, although it does have some well-known adherents.

Sorry--that was pretty pedantic. I so rarely get to talk about Uralic stuff these days. Carry on.

Also, there's evidence that Basque may be related to (or more likely descended from) Aquitainian, which is extinct. I'm not a Vasconist, so I don't know the details well, but it's the only theory out of hundreds regarding "Basque related to X" that has any traction, and the only one Larry Trask (one of the leading Basque experts of the 20th Century) felt was plausible.

Clock Spider Jerusalem:brigid_fitch: No, Russian sounds like a normal, Eastern European language. Hungarian, on the other hand, sounds utterly alien. My paternal grandmother and her 5 sisters were all from Hungary. When they'd get together, it sounded like Klingons discussing battle strategy.

That language is supposed to be related to Basque, Finnish, and Estonian. Those three are nice sounding. Hungarin is weird. Blame paprika.

Russian is a Slavic language. It's not related to Finnish, Estonian, or Basque. Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are related to each other. They are in the Finno-Urgric language family. Basque is a language isolate. It is related to no other living language or known dead language.

brigid_fitch:No, Russian sounds like a normal, Eastern European language. Hungarian, on the other hand, sounds utterly alien. My paternal grandmother and her 5 sisters were all from Hungary. When they'd get together, it sounded like Klingons discussing battle strategy.

That's because most Eastern European languages are Slavic. Hungarian is so "weird" because it's Uralic (a family completely different from Indo-European) with Finnish and Estonian.